Gregg Petersen, Regional Director, MEA and SAARC, Veeam Software speaks about the company’s participation at GITEX this year.
What is the primary focus of your participation at this year’s GITEX?
Veeam Software is reiterating its commitment to helping Middle East enterprises meet the requirements for 24.7.365 availability by announcing its participation at GITEX Technology Week. We will be showcasing the new Veeam Availability Suite 9.5, an upgraded version of the earlier solution that delivers recovery time and point objectives (RTPO) of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data, ensuring they are accessible whenever and wherever they are needed. A big focus at GITEX this year will be on building awareness about the newly launched ‘Veeam Availability Platform for the Hybrid Cloud’.
What is the relevance of this show to your business in the region?
GITEX offers a great platform for vendors, partners and customers to get together and share ideas. Over the past five years we have used GITEX as an opportunity to showcase our products and capabilities and to meet with both existing and prospective clients and partners. I can attribute much of our success to the relationships we have built and fostered at the event and I expect GITEX 2015 to be no different.
What kind of products and solutions are you showcasing at the event?
Veeam will be showcasing the Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 which will introduce new features including expanded storage snapshot integration to Nimble Storage, cloud restore for any Veeam backup, a technology partnership with Microsoft designed to modernize the organization’s private cloud platform and enterprise applications, and enhanced VMware vCloud Director support for service providers. With the newly launched ‘Veeam Availability Platform for the Hybrid Cloud’, the company delivers the next generation of availability for virtual, physical, and cloud-based workloads to enable the Always-On Enterprise.
How does GITEX help you connect with your customers and partners?
There is no better technology event in the region to connect with customers and partners as Gitex. Every year we have meaningful and memorable interactions where we build relationships as well as a pipeline of business for the forthcoming year.
What kind of IT trends do you see impacting the regional ICT industry in the next two years?
Data center consolation and virtualization are big trends here in the Middle East and will have a big impact on the regional ICT industry over the next few years. Veeam is uniquely positioned to help customers transition to these technologies.
There is still a skills shortage in the region that doesn’t allow people to plan and then implement a successful Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy. Secondly the cost of bandwidth and/or rentals prohibit people from moving forward with any DR strategy. This is one of the reasons we are seeing an increased interest in Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and Backup as a Service (BaaS). Veeam is uniquely placed with Veeam Cloud Connect solution to help partners offer these services to their clients.
